Going in to this session I had really high expectations after last week’s really engaging discussion. Unfortunately, this was the most unproductive session we had as a group so far. The session started 30 mins later than usual because people forgot we had Soliya, some overslept because of the time change and others had technical difficulties. Therefore, we just spent the first half an hour talking about what we did during the past week until the rest of the group members showed up.
As the session began, the facilitator asked us to explain the Stumbling Blocks by Barna reading as some people didn’t get the chance to read it while others only managed to skim through it. Therefore, only three of us who had done the reading responded and began to explain it to the others which took up about half an hour. Then, the facilitator asked us to state which of the stumbling blocks we had encountered during our Soliya Sessions. We all had similar answers, that during the first two sessions there was assumptions of similarity, high anxiety and one of the Americans said that they found language barriers since they couldn’t understand the English dialect of some of those from other parts of the world. However, we all agreed that by now – none of these stumbling blocks are relevant to our discussions. We also talked about if we had experienced any of these stumbling blocks in other aspects of our life and the majority of us responded with the idea that we had experienced stereotyping when traveling. However, this discussion lacked enthusiasm or interest from most people and so it was the most boring session we had yet and it made me feel somewhat demotivated.
Fortunately, during the last 15 minutes of the session we broke out into our final project groups to discuss our final project topics. Fadila & I were paired with a Hispanic girl who lived in the USA and so she talked about aspects of religious discrimination and the Muslim ban that were really interesting to us. However, we only got the chance to discuss Fadila’s topic since we barely had enough time. I was still unsure about whether I wanted to talk about poverty, education, stereotypes or gender discrimination for my final project since I’m very passionate about all four topics. But as the group discussion progressed, and we were talking about the Muslim ban – the Hispanic girl explained that in the USA you can sue cities, states, the president and even the entire country and this was really surprising for me since in Egypt we don’t have that chance to challenge authority and so now, I added this onto my topic list. This conversation was the highlight of the session, since it was full of enthusiasm and we got to learn new viewpoints and things about other parts of the world.
(Note: Image Source – https://goo.gl/images/cmX7VA)
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